We need new ways of thinking to evolve from the crisis. And we need to break with established rules to discard old thinking patterns completely.

Examples?

  • If Elon Musk had not broken the rules of an outright high-tech industry, SpaceX would not have come to exist.
  • Usually, return rates of three to five percent are being considered as an absolute limit. Determined by the system, Zalando is assuming 80 to 95 percent as a prerequisite for their business model.
  • In Israel, military elite units are developing new medical appliances and robots supporting medical staff.

In the future, we need new rules, for example regarding factory planning. We need safety distances; we need the hygienically optimized factory. The pandemic will and must affect building and office planning.

Currently, managing the crisis has top priority. Still, all running and planned factories and buildings for office and retail must be hygienically upgraded to new standards. Thanks to excellent modular construction, the costs per square meter have dropped significantly. We need key figures that include, for example, absence rates due to sick leave. In average, commercially employed people in Germany were on sick leave for 18 workdays in the year 2018. This equals eight percent of all workdays. In a company with 1,000 employees, 80 people are missing on a yearly average, which sums up to 5 million euros a year when assuming regular remuneration. Every year!

If we succeed in reducing this rate by only one percentage point by realizing greater distances between people, this would sum up to an equivalent value of six million euros over the period of ten years. By modular construction, each employee could be provided with 15 square meters of high-quality workspace.

This is only one example and not even well thought out. Thinking out of the box is even more elementary now than it has ever been before! Complement your interdisciplinary team. Judge external contributions by results instead of costs.